Nurses on the Front Lines

For Terri Schelter and Nancy Moser there's nothing abstract about America's health care meltdown. It's personal.

The two CWA members have been nurses for more than 30 years in different parts of the country. But the changes they've seen are strikingly similar:  Fewer nurses with sicker patients and more duties. Fewer days when the rewards of the job make up for the stress.

"We talk about the good old days all the time," said Schelter, an operating room nurse at Buffalo General Hospital in New York and the legislative director for Nurses United, CWA Local 1168. "Patients would be admitted the day before an operation and we'd meet them and answer questions, have post-operative visits. Now they roll them in and roll them out. It's like assembly-line nursing."

Schelter, a nurse since 1975, and Moser, a Burlington, Iowa, nurse since 1974, both believe some form of national health care is needed to control costs and improve patient care.

"I've heard that if all the insurance companies just used the same form it would save millions of dollars a year," said Moser, a delivery room nurse who is president of CWA Local 7181. "Any movement at all toward a unified type of system would be an improvement."

The nurses have something else in common: Neither will have employer-paid health insurance coverage when they retire, making universal health care that much more of a priority for them and their members.

Schelter's local is pushing for reform by talking to lawmakers and educating the Buffalo community. With a coalition of other activists, they sponsored a hearing with members of Congress and staff last fall and regularly make presentations to churches, unions and other groups.

But simply making sure everyone has insurance won't truly reform the system as long as profit trumps patient care, she said. 

"I hear a lot of people say, 'I've got good health insurance,'" Schelter said. "I tell them that you can have the best insurance in the world, but if there aren't enough people in the hospital to take care of you, you're not going to get quality care. If you don't have a nurse to answer your light, what good is your insurance?"